GM To Hire 1,500 IT Pros In Michigan

IT development center in Warren is the latest location in General Motors' plan to ramp up staff and reduce its use of outsourcing.

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General Motors is opening what it calls an Information Technology Innovation Center in Warren, Mich., where it will hire up to 1,500 IT pros over the next several years. This is the latest step in GM's IT overhaul under new CIO Randy Mott, in which the automaker is hiring employees to do technology work rather than relying on outsourcers.

The automaker plans to have four of these IT development centers in the U.S. GM last month opened one in Austin, Texas, where it plans to hire up to 500 people. The other locations haven't been announced. Mott said the centers' locations would be chosen based on the quality of talent they'll be able to attract, including their proximity to universities.

GM has relied on outsourcers for about 90% of its IT work, from developing software to operating data centers. Mott, who was named GM CIO in February, intends to reverse that percentage, bringing 90% of the company's IT work in-house and using outsourcers for just 10%. It's a high-risk strategy change that will mean hiring thousands of tech pros and building a new culture of IT innovation and collaboration with the rest of GM. But Mott maintains that IT staffers will better understand the automotive industry and thus come up with more innovative ways to use technology than outsourcers could.

GM already has a data center in Warren, north of Detroit, that will be the site of one of GM's two global data centers. GM plans to consolidate its more than 20 data centers into two. The new development center is at the same location as the data center. The company says it has jobs available in software development, project management, database management, and business analysis, and that it's recruiting recent college graduates and experienced professionals (Applications at careers.gm.com/itjobs.)

Actually, if you were worried before, you still should be -- nothing changes about the data centers. There still is a data center in Warren, and at the same location there will be an innovation center where this development work happens. That is the new piece of news that we didn't know in July -- that this 1,500 person team of development-oriented staff will be at Warren, along with the data center.

I agree GAProgrammer that it looks like a lot rehashed from the July article and perhaps an effort to get the name Mott back in the press. And like I said in that case, 2 DCs in the same area subject to brownouts or disservice due to environment conditions would have been a DR planning fundamental failure. I guess understanding now that one of the two is a dedicated "innovation" center (implies non operational in nature) changes that.

No, I don't believe it did. We wrote in July that GM would have 1 of its 4 new dev centers in Michigan, and that Warren would be one of its two data centers. We wrote last month that a dev center would be in Austin. But this is the first confirmation of Warren as a dev center.